Religions > Atheism > Christianity's atrocities: The Epic Crime That Dares Not Speak Its Name
| Topic: |
Religions > Atheism |
| User: |
"Fredric L. Rice" |
| Date: |
28 Oct 2005 01:23:21 PM |
| Object: |
Christianity's atrocities: The Epic Crime That Dares Not Speak Its Name |
The Epic Crime That Dares Not Speak Its Name
By John Pilger
10/27/05 "ICH " -- -- A Royal Air Force officer is about to be tried
before a military court for refusing to return to Iraq because the war
is illegal. Malcolm Kendall-Smith is the first British officer to face
criminal charges for challenging the legality of the invasion and
occupation. He is not a conscientious objector; he has completed two
tours in Iraq. When he came home the last time, he studied the reasons
given for attacking Iraq and concluded he was breaking the law. His
position is supported by international lawyers all over the world, not
least by Kofi Annan, the UN secretary general, who said in September
last year: "The US-led invasion of Iraq was an illegal act that
contravened the UN Charter."
The question of legality deeply concerns the British military brass,
who sought Tony Blair's assurance on the eve of the invasion, got it
and, as they now know, were lied to. They are right to worry; Britain
is a signatory to the treaty that set up the International Criminal
Court, which draws its codes from the Geneva Conventions and the 1945
Nuremberg Charter. The latter is clear: "To initiate a war of
aggression... is not only an international crime, it is the supreme
international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it
contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole."
At the Nuremberg trial of the Nazi leadership, counts one and two,
"Conspiracy to wage aggressive war and waging aggressive war", refer
to "the common plan or conspiracy". These are defined in the
indictment as "the planning, preparation, initiation and waging of
wars of aggression, which were also wars in violation of international
treaties, agreements and assurances". A wealth of evidence is now
available that George Bush, Blair and their advisers did just that.
The leaked minutes from the infamous Downing Street meeting in July
2002 alone reveal that Blair and his war cabinet knew that it was
illegal. The attack that followed, mounted against a defenceless
country offering no threat to the US or Britain, has a precedent in
Hitler's invasion of Sudetenland; the lies told to justify both are
eerily similar.
The similarity is also striking in the illegal bombing campaign that
preceded both. Unknown to most people in Britain and America, British
and US planes conducted a ferocious bombing campaign against Iraq in
the ten months prior to the invasion, hoping this would provoke Saddam
Hussein into supplying an excuse for an invasion. It failed and killed
an unknown number of civilians.
At Nuremberg, counts three and four referred to "War crimes and crimes
against humanity". Here again, there is overwhelming evidence that
Blair and Bush committed "violations of the laws or customs of war"
including "murder... of civilian populations of or in occupied
territory, murder or ill-treatment of prisoners of war".
Two recent examples: the US onslaught near Ramadi this month in which
39 men, women and children - all civilians - were killed, and a report
by the United Nations special rapporteur in Iraq who described the
Anglo-American practice of denying food and water to Iraqi civilians
in order to force them to leave their towns and villages as a
"flagrant violation" of the Geneva Conventions.
In September, Human Rights Watch released an epic study that documents
the systematic nature of torture by the Americans, and how casual it
is, even enjoyable. This is a sergeant from the US Army's 82nd
Airborne Division: "On their day off people would show up all the
time. Everyone in camp knew if you wanted to work out your frustration
you show up at the PUC [prisoners'] tent. In a way it was sport... One
day a sergeant shows up and tells a PUC to grab a pole. He told him to
bend over and broke the guy's leg with a mini Louisville Slugger that
was a metal [baseball] bat. He was the fucking cook!"
The report describes how the people of Fallujah, the scene of numerous
American atrocities, regard the 82nd Airborne as "the Murdering
Maniacs". Reading it, you realise that the occupying force in Iraq is,
as the head of Reuters said recently, out of control. It is destroying
lives in industrial quantities when compared with the violence of the
resistance.
Who will be punished for this? According to Sir Michael Jay, the
permanent under-secretary of state who gave evidence before the
Parliamentary Foreign Affairs Committee on 24 June 2003, "Iraq was on
the agenda of each cabinet meeting in the nine months or so until the
conflict broke out in April". How is it possible that in 20 or more
cabinet meetings, ministers did not learn about Blair's conspiracy
with Bush? Or, if they did, how is it possible they were so
comprehensively deceived?
Charles Clarke's position is important because, as the current British
Home Secretary (interior minister), he has proposed a series of
totalitarian measures that emasculate habeas corpus, which is the
barrier between a democracy and a police state. Clarke's proposals
pointedly ignore state terrorism and state crime and, by clear
implication, say they require no accountability. Great crimes, such as
invasion and its horrors, can proceed with impunity. This is
lawlessness on a vast scale. Are the people of Britain going to allow
this, and those responsible to escape justice? Flight Lieutenant
Kendall-Smith speaks for the rule of law and humanity and deserves our
support.
First published in the New Statesman - www.newstatesman.co.uk
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